I Said Yes to Everything: A Memoir (12 page)

A
rthur Penn and William Gibson sent a script. Come in and read for
Two for the Seesaw
, the part of Gittel. Gittel was like a second cousin to the shoplifter of
Detective Story
, so I knew why Arthur wanted me.

Arnie asked me what I thought of the script.

“Terrible,” I said. “He has her going to the potty onstage. Tasteless. It’s only two characters onstage all the time. It’s awful.”

How could I get out of it without hurting Arthur’s feelings? I knew. I wouldn’t go into character. I’d read Gittel like the upper-middle-class girl I really was. I just wouldn’t get her. I wouldn’t have to tell them I didn’t like the play.

It worked. I walked into the room. Arthur and William Gibson, who wrote it, were there. Over and over I read for them. Over and over Arthur tried to reach me. Finally he gave up.

I was thrilled with myself.

I ran into Paddy Chayefsky on Sixth Avenue and told him the whole story. He thought I was very clever. Needless to say, two or three months later
Two for the Seesaw
opened to rave reviews, changed
the face of theater, and catapulted Anne Bancroft to stardom. I was in shock. The last vestiges of respect Arnie had for my opinions were gone, and I was so jealous of Anne, I cried.

I was married to a sexy, charismatic, intellectual Jewish guy who loved me off and on, mostly off. After the five-year mark, mostly off. He basically needed me as an au pair for the boys and an added source of income. He was coping with keeping afloat financially with a dangerous heart problem. Also trying to fight a political assault as a deeply committed Communist.

I found I was making a fool of myself often, like a child vying for his attention. As I moved toward the end of my twenties, I became unattractive. At the unemployment insurance office, the young man checking my files asked my age. Coyly, I said, “How old do you think I am?” I was twenty-nine.

He said immediately, “Twenty-nine.”

I blinked, went home, and got in bed. Almost thirty. I was old.

“Nothing,” I said when Arnie asked what was wrong with me.

I was too insecure. He told me once I looked young with my glasses on.

“Really?” I said.

The glasses stayed on for weeks while I waited for another compliment. How boring was I? How bored was he!

He was my mirror. I had no career. At home I became dumber and homelier.

I was offered the London company of
Seesaw
, which of course was out of the question. Arnie suggested I ask about understudying Anne in the part. So the understudy went off to star in London and I filled her job.

I was resentful. I was impossible with Arthur Penn. Every direction he gave I fought because I thought it was to make me more like
Anne. I’d never seen the play. I didn’t want to until I’d found my own Gittel. I asked for the stage manager, Porter Van Zandt, to show me the stage moves, for Arthur to give me more time alone, away from him. He didn’t know what to do with me. He had a hornet on his hands, an insecure, resentful actress who was venting the rage she couldn’t feel or show at home.

At my wits’ end, unable to find the character, I finally sneaked into a matinee. The dawn broke, the sun came out. It was a love story! They loved each other! Remember love, attraction? Liking people? Enjoying them? Remember having fun? Poor Arthur! I never told him this. I never apologized for being impossible, but that wasn’t the end of it.

I had just about mastered the first act of the play, maybe walked through the second act once or twice, when a phone call came.

“You’re on tonight! Annie has her period.”

I could feel the blood draining from my brain. I looked at where I had been sitting a second ago. The children and Arnie were sitting around the table eating dinner. Spaghetti marinara; the children’s mouths were red with it. Arnie looked at me questioningly,

“They want me to go on tonight. Annie has her period.”

Tonight. I will leave the pasta and this family and in two hours go onstage at the Belasco Theatre in a play I don’t know, for an audience that has paid good money to see a wonderful play with a different actress—who’s gotten rave reviews.

I’d been accepting a salary. I’d utterly blocked out this possibility, and it was here.

I don’t know how I got in a cab, but I remember the ride, how cold I was. Marie Antoinette on the tumbrel could not have faced the guillotine with greater disbelief or dread than I faced this night.
Unprepared.
There is no more shameful and reprehensible word for an actor. I didn’t know how I was going to get through the night.

Aside from the fact that I had never learned or blocked the second act, there were turntables for each apartment, Gittel’s and Jerry’s. One had to know how and when to get on and off in order to land in each apartment. Then there were clothes changes I’d never gotten to. Tights, skirts, pj’s.

I entered Anne Bancroft’s dressing room, where a very efficient, but officious, large woman took charge. I was trying to learn the lines for the second act. She was telling me I had to wash my feet between scenes. I called Porter Van Zandt.

“Let me concentrate.”

She left the room.

Henry Fonda looked in. His face was trusty, his eyes were cornflower blue. I spilled my heart out. I had to let him know. We had never as much as read a line together, and suddenly he would have a partner, inadequate, who should not be on that stage with him.

Porter announced, “The understudy for Ms. Bancroft will go on tonight.”

A few people in the audience left, and then childbirth began—blurry, jumping off turntables, clothes torn off me, clothes thrust on me, shoes, clothes, white peroxide on my upper lip in Gittel’s apartment that wasn’t wiped off for Jerry’s apartment.

I sensed a fascination in the audience, a kind of horror at being present at the scene of an accident. Nobody knew when the crash would take place. Hank said, “I’ll take you through it. Hold on.”

I never took my eyes off his strong, steady, blue, blue eyes. He never took his off me. He was holding me and leading me like a dancer, a doctor-dancer, and I made it to the end. He got an ovation at curtain; the audience had watched him make this happen. It was his night. Hank had once told me that he was more comfortable onstage than any other place in life. To experience that real strength and intimacy
with him was a life lesson and a privilege. No other actor after him could have done it. I know.

Anne left the show and I stayed on, stepping into my own Gittel finally. A series of different Hollywood leading men followed—Dana Andrews, Jeffrey Lynn, Hal March. But it was Gittel’s play. The audience was on her side. Except for that one night when Hank Fonda saved Gittel’s life.

I
was offered two independent movies while I was blacklisted. As I buzzed around our new apartment at 444 Central Park West in my uniform skirt and sweater, the phone rang and it was John Frankenheimer, a charismatic, successful young director who offered me the lead opposite Burt Lancaster in
The Young Savages
. I became dizzy. I had to sit down. I was scared. I didn’t realize how comfortable I’d become in anonymity. To step out of it into a big, blazing, mainstream film was to risk the abyss. I knew that Burt Lancaster had worked with Waldo Salt, that he was one of those progressive good guys, like his good friend Kirk Douglas. Did I meet with John Frankenheimer? I must have. The part, I think, was a social worker raised in a tough neighborhood who had once had a thing with Burt’s character. I could be wrong, but that’s what I remember.

Day of the shoot. A car took me to a street set. One Hundred and Sixteenth Street somewhere, teeming neighborhood, mostly Latino, black. My first scene was to be shot on that street. The neighbors had their chairs out; the kids were running around, screaming. I was packed into the backseat of a limo with John and Burt Lancaster, whom I’d never met, to go over the lines for a scene where we bump
into each other on the street for the first time in years. Someone said, “We need to get this shot”; the windows of the car were open to the street. Burt Lancaster, bigger than life, godlike in beauty and power, movie star, was saying his lines, and suddenly I felt all the Method reality I’d worked on leak out of me, never to return. It was all too much, too fast, and too public, and Burt’s presence so big and unreal and startling that I was outside myself watching from the bottom of a well.

They took me to makeup and hair, which was set up in the classroom of a public school, then released me to the street, to the crowds, the lights, and eventually Burt, whom my character hadn’t seen in a long time. He and I exchanged some flirtatious words and exited. It was my shot, long shot, walking up to Burt, his back to the camera that is facing me. Action! I worked on moving my legs. I felt my hips pushing them to move. My heel caught on the concrete. I wanted to die. At the end of the walk stood Zeus, the sun—or was it the lights?—blazing behind his golden head, making me squint as I forced my mouth to say lines I had absolutely no connection with. Later, as they put me in the car to take me home, I knew that it was my first and last day, and I was relieved. Shelley Winters quickly replaced me, and the film went on.

When I was fired from the Burt Lancaster film, Arnie took pity on me. I was so humiliated, I couldn’t stop crying. I was talentless in front of everybody, the whole block, such a pitiful klutz in front of Lancaster. Arnie took me with him to the racetrack. He always went with his friend Norman Shelley. I sat on a wooden bench out of the loop, but happy to be asked, happy to be part of his outside life.

Much later, in another life, I was on
The Dick Cavett Show
with Richard Rodgers and Burt Lancaster. I said something to Dick Cavett like, “This is the first man who ever hired me”—nodding to Rodgers—“and this is the first man who ever fired me”—nodding to Lancaster. It
felt sweet. I was in the catbird seat. Years later, Frankenheimer attacked me in a restaurant, screamed at me, “Why?” It was all a jumble at the time.

I didn’t get it. Now I do. I don’t know what strings they, especially Burt, had to pull to get a studio to hire me, but they did. He had to fire me. I couldn’t step up to the job. I have a lot of people to apologize to in my life. I wish I had done it when I had the chance.

A
rnie had a heart attack. Walter Bernstein’s brother was his doctor. The minute Dr. Bernstein told me, I hated him—“the doctor.” I resented him. He could have prevented this. “Save him,” I told him. Arnie was in a hospital on Long Island. I took our car and drove there. I have no sense of direction; I don’t know how I got there. When I did, I sat in a chair opposite the bed and stared at Arnie. I had no words. None. After a couple of hours, he said, “Go home.” How intolerable those visits must have been for him. To have to deal, in his precarious health, with someone like me—inadequate and shell-shocked. I knew I couldn’t drive out by myself anymore without rearranging life at home, with anxious children who needed me. I was fine with that. I had a language with them, feelings, motherliness, normality. I was real. I had none of that with Arnie. I did not know how to talk or what to say.

•   •   •

U
ntil Boris Pasternak and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, there was no real art coming out of the USSR. The Soviets made movies with happy peasants singing on tractors. Great composers were being reprimanded for not writing music for the masses. Only the ballet was left alone. The people loved the classics.
Swan Lake
was safe.

I learned not to express these opinions to Arnie, since they made him furious. “You don’t understand,” he’d say. He would reprimand me in front of company in our living room for joking about something he considered sacred. I felt shamed, minimized. When I tried to talk to him about the way he made me feel, he would go to his room and slam the door. I would write boring three-page letters trying to pour out my heart, as close to Marxism as I could get. They would be slid back under the door, where I waited. Sometimes with small grammatical corrections, but always, “Unless you can write me in acceptable terms, don’t write!” That, of course, meant with a knowledge of Marxist philosophy. I tried rereading Marx, but I didn’t know what I was reading or how to apply it.

Eventually, I stopped talking and started painting. I had a lot to get out of my system. Because Fremo was a painter, there had always been art in my life. I’m a good second-rate painter, and painting became a necessary passion for me. I did an ink and watercolor of a woman, her back to the viewer, sitting at a small square table in the middle of a room. There was a Persian rug on the floor. The windows and door were too high on the walls to be reached.

I knew I needed help. I started going to Dr. Austin, a psychiatrist. I was beginning to disassociate. I’d find myself staring out the kitchen window, startled when Arnie entered, when anybody entered. The children and Dinah were a life force; so was teaching. When I wasn’t connected to them, I felt myself floating in a balloon that would rise, unmoored over the city, out, out into the unknown. What I was most afraid of was causing Arnie to have another heart attack, of causing his death by some unthinking, thoughtless act of mine.

When Arnie came home from the hospital, he was worried about working, about his health, about money.
Seesaw
had closed. My teaching money was just enough to pay Vi. We both felt the pressure.

J
ust at this time, one of the bad lawyers, Marty Gang, who had gotten Lee Cobb and others to give names, got in touch with my aunt Anne Rosenthal. Anne was the top entertainment lawyer at William Morris. She worked with Abe Lastfogel, the head of the firm. She told me Marty Gang had called her, they had discussed me, and he felt he could get me off the Blacklist because of his contacts with the committee.

Arnie and I talked about it. I thought it was a trick. I knew it was a trick. Arnie felt we could use it. If together we went over everything I said to Gang, maybe we could use him the same way he was trying to use me. We knew it was a trap, but he had the wrong actor. I was not so desperate for work that I would turn anybody in, as he pressed his other clients to do.

As I’m writing, I suddenly want a cigarette. I haven’t wanted a cigarette in thirty years.

I met with him twice at someone else’s law office, in a small dark room. I felt safer meeting with him as Gittel—an open New York girl, not too smart, a girl who instinctively followed her heart. A creature of
impulse, warm, sunny. Arnie and I went over his questions. They were about my AFTRA meetings. Gittel could handle them.

Marty Gang and I took a plane to Washington, D.C., to meet with the lawyers who worked with the Un-American Activities Committee. It was like an audition. It was a cool, sunny day, and there were about four men huddled around the edge of a long table in a large committee room. They activated a recording machine. The questions came fast. Gittel answered them with her usual bumbling innocence. Marty took over the questions, showing off for them or trying to justify bringing down such an innocent but dumb, uncooperative witness. My impression was that the Committee had run out of theater and film people and was casting around for a way to justify its existence. Marty focused on a meeting I had had around the selection of the president for AFTRA. Who did I meet with?

Gittel: They changed, you know what I mean? Different people all the time. Nice people, very educated. Yeah, I gave money, a couple of bucks, dollars, I mean. It went for food, lunch, you know what I mean?

Them: Where’d you go after the meeting?

Gittel: Go someplace—have coffee, you know?

Them: Who with?

Gittel: Different people each time, nice people.

Them: Just coffee?

Gittel: Oh you know, go shopping, shop around.

Them: Who did you go shopping with?

Gittel:
(squirming)
Who did I go shopping with?

Them: You must know who you went shopping with.

I cast about furiously for an answer; who would I go shopping with? Who had nothing to do with the Party and the union? My mind went to two women who were totally out of the loop, but who were
helpful, sympathetic, and had no careers or jobs to lose. The men at the table were observing me.

Me: I think Elaine and Mary and I shopped in a dress shop after the coffee—

Them: Who?

Me: Yeah, we didn’t buy anything, just shopped.

Them: Who?

Me: Elaine Eldmore, Mary Murphy, and me. We went to the dress shop.

Whew. I got away with it. Gittel did. Ditsy Gittel. But I realized it was an exercise in futility. A fishing expedition for Martin Gang’s next informant. The lawyers clearly thought I was a waste of time, either a charlatan or an idiot. They were barely civil. Martin Gang was grim. We flew back to New York in separate seats, across the aisle from each other.

It wasn’t until I was on the plane back to New York that it hit me. I gave them names. The names of two real women. I could feel my heart sink inside me. I burst through the door of the apartment and broke down crying. Sobbing. Arnie was lying on my bed. “I gave names.” I told him what had happened. “You didn’t give names.” I had been so easily tricked. What would happen to those poor women? Out of the blue. I don’t even know what made me think of them. I’d felt cornered, as Gittel had been cornered, and thought,
What a smart way out.

But in my mind on that plane and forever afterward, I felt I had put two innocent and real women’s lives and careers in jeopardy. That I couldn’t trust myself.

The next time I introduced one old friend to another, my mind went blank—I literally could not remember their names. I know one part of me is forever punishing another part of me, for life. My throat
closes when I think of the guilt and panic I feel, and felt from then till now. It’s no accident that I went from years of not being able to remember or say names to the sudden inability to remember lines or, worse still, the fear that I would forget them. Fear. Without meaning to, I realized that I could say something unforeseen that would damage and cause untold destruction to another person.

•   •   •

I
just reread what I wrote about that afternoon. What I feel is missing from that description was the depth of my desperation and guilt. The slip of the tongue that haunted my conscience affected my memory for names forever.

That afternoon in Washington, in the lions’ den with the Committee lawyers and Martin Gang questioning me—no, pushing me to incriminate myself as a Communist, to incriminate other actors, Gang pushed the idea that our union meetings were really Communist cells, with money contributed for Communist causes.

Why did I go to Washington? Why did I put myself in such a dangerous position? Arnie felt it was worth a shot. If I was cleared I could earn a living, hugely important after his heart attack, which had changed everything and frightened both of us.

My choice was to use the character of Gittel to see me through the experience. Gittel was an innocent. A brave, funny girl who took chances. Gittel was disarming, charming. Audiences loved Gittel. I ought to know; I played her on Broadway every night for a year. She was a great cover for my fear. I feel a near faint still when I think of that fear. We had gone over any possible question they could ask me about him, our friends, the meetings—in Gittel’s character and out. We knew from the outset that Martin Gang just wanted to bring them another trophy. For his own reasons, Arnie felt there was a slim chance
that these lawyers would recommend lifting the Blacklist on me. It was basically an audition session. Writing this, I realize the extent of the idiocy on all sides.

In another life, many, many years later, I would discover that Elaine Eldmore worked in children’s theater and did extra work on television.

And Mary, I was told, married a general.

But for me, in saying their names in front of the lawyers, the damage was done.